Let’s get one thing straight: it’s hard to be married to the president. From coming up with epoch-defining slogans like “Be Best” to decking the White House halls with bizarre Christmas decor, it’s a tougher gig than most of us can imagine.
Our current first lady, Melania Trump, is well aware of the challenge after her previous four-year stint in the White House. Notoriously private — or perhaps just too busy to make public appearances — the first lady’s life has been shrouded in mystery.
However, a new self-authored memoir is changing that.
Titled “Melania,” the first lady’s recent coffee table book spills the saucy details of pivotal moments in her life, like her first encounter with Donald, the assassination attempt in Butler, Pennsylvania, and her defense of life as a child in the Socialist Republic of Yugoslavia (yes, really.)
And though the American public doesn’t often get the chance to hear their first lady speak, she’s now offering the next best thing — a narration of her book by an AI-generated facsimile of her voice.
“I am honored to bring you Melania — The AI Audiobook — narrated entirely using artificial intelligence in my own voice,” the first lady wrote on X-formerly-Twitter. “Let the future of publishing begin.”
To roll out the nearly seven-hour audiobook, Melania partnered with ElevenLabs, a text-to-speech software company that sells “voice AI” services.
A Slovenian immigrant who’s claimed to be fluent in five languages, Melania’s English accent is distinctive. As a language, Slovene is highly inflective, featuring rolled r’s, odd consonant clusters, and pitched accents — one of the last two Slavic languages to do so. Any software company hoping to accurately replicate the first lady’s unique accent would have to account for these extremely particular linguistic hurdles, and their effects on whichever non-Slovenian language she’s speaking.
The first lady says she “worked closely” with ElevenLabs to roll out the AI. On its website, ElevenLabs says it takes anywhere from two to four hours to professionally clone a voice. Given that the audiobook runs for seven hours, it does raise a logistical question: why didn’t she just record it herself?
The timing of the audiobook is also noteworthy. Last month, Melania made a rare appearance in front of the press to support federal legislation meant to cut down on AI-generated deepfakes online.
“Artificial intelligence and social media are the digital candy for the next generation: sweet, addictive, and engineered to have an impact on the cognitive development of our children,” she said in her speech. “Today, I’m proud to say that the values of ‘Be Best’ will be reflected in the law.”
It isn’t clear where Melania draws the line between “digital candy” and “the future of publishing,” but it’s probably somewhere in the hundreds of thousands of dollars.
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